Tarek Eltayeb

Media

Review of The Palm House by Tarek Eltayeb

“Tarek Eltayeb has written this novel
to prove that narration can indeed overcome the difficulties
and illnesses of this era, and that it can even conquer man’s estrangement.”

The Arabic poetry and prose of the Sudanese-born author Tarek Eltayeb
(who grew up in Egypt before moving to Austria, where he lives today)
has received widespread critical acclaim for many years. The publication
of The Palm House (bayt un-nakhiil, Eltayeb’s second novel)
this year in Cairo has met with almost universal praise from literary
critics across the Arab world. Hamza, the novel’s narrator, continues
the tale he begun in Eltayeb’s first novel, Cities without Palms (mudun
bilaa nakhiil), and once more travels to Europe, this time to
Vienna, where he scrapes out a living selling newspapers on the street.
The critic Ahmad Sadiq Ahmad writes in his review for the online Al-Sahafa
journal: “We gasp for breath with Hamza, and we feel his tension as
his languished soul meets Sandra, a lovely Austrian woman who shows
him a world of love. […] Tarek El-Tayeb’s writing takes us on a journey
through both time and space. The narrative focus often shifts from
Vienna to the dear native village of ‘Wad An-Nar’ in Sudan which so
haunts Hamza’s memories. Eltayeb’s novel juxtaposes the displacement
and dispersion of Sudanese in exile with the horrors of Sudan’s civil
war and the murders, famine and corruption that have ravaged the country.”

In his review of The Palm House for the Juzuur Cultural
Foundation’s online journal, the writer and critic Abd An-Nasser Aysuwy
asserts that Eltayeb’s novel establishes art as a means of
“overcoming man’s feelings of estrangement.” He continues: “ He achieves
this through prose that seems remarkably simple to the reader, and
yet is, in truth, extraordinarily deep. The centerpoint of this prose
is the protagonist Hamza, who has travelled to Austria with nothing
but a copy of 1001 Nights, the singer Ismahan’s song Nights of
Pleasure in Vienna and some painful memories; yet he also possesses
a vast array of stories from his home, and the gift of knowing how
to tell those stories.” Sharif Ash-Shafi’s review in Saudia Arabia’s
Al-Riyadh newspaper also has glowing praise for the novel:
“In the previous novel Cities without Palms, Hamza swallowed the bitterness
of loss caused by the ills of the Third World and in particular those
of the least developed countries; in The Palm House, he places these
ills alongside those of the First World and compares them, defying
them with an onslaught of stories, an onslaught of art. Through his
spiritual exodus to the Palm House, he topples that fictitious giant
called ‘estrangement,’ and restores man’s lost humanity.”